Sonar 2006 by Night: Saturday

Make it out to Sonar by Night and the first thing that strikes you are the enormous video screens flanking the stages, from which eminated the proof that the more electronic a performance is, the more boring it is to look at. The musical highlight of my evening was Ryan Elliott, a DJ from Detroit who almost faded into the wall at the back of the stage. But I was dancing so it didn’t matter – I think I looked up at the screen four times.

The screens worked wonderfully for the artists whose music had a performative element: the bird’s eye view of Diplo’s turntable skills was mesmerising and techno diva Miss Kittin was a sight to behold. But for the purely electronic artists, the 50-foot Hollywood treatment served only to highlight just how little of their music was live: watching The MFA twiddling knobs got old real fast, and furious MTV-style cutting couldn’t save Isolee and his Mac: he didn’t seem to be doing much of anything except concentrating.

But when the computers perform the music, what exactly is an artist supposed to do in front of a crowd of thousands? One option is to go the Kraftwerk route, integrating your videos, robots and lasers into a spectacle that will zonk even the arm-folders at the back. Despite Sonar’s multimedia tag, nobody on Saturday night took on the challenge, save for perhaps Bodycode, who matched his industrial thump to video static and noise to thunderous effect. The alternative is for electronic musicians to actually play their instruments live – always interesting to watch – but the computer interfaces aren’t up to it yet. When the knobs on the box can be played live with the dexterity of, say, a violin, (and also when musicians can play together more easily), then we’ll have come full circle, and we can get back to what is most interesting: human performances.

But anyway, it was a dance party. Held in a cavernous hangar on the outskirts of Barcelona, Sonar gets things right: the sound systems were top notch, the security unobtrusive and there were little touches that made all the difference: a tent fitted out with a Saturday Night Fever dancefloor, walkways with mood lighting and dodgems. Dodgems! (I first thought they were going to be playing ambient all night at the dodgems. What a great touch – people slamming into each other to soothing synth washes. But alas, next time we walked past there were beats.)

Techno scientist Isolee got the best sound of the night: his bass was crystal clear and the huge stacks revealed another layer in the bottom end of his intricate, handmade techno. But the music was too subtle to fill up a venue of this size – it was most effective when it was at its largest, the ebb and flow of his ideas wandering too aimlessly to scratch the itch of thousands of people wanting to dance, dance, dance. Killer new material though.

Most incongruous were the Digable Planets, surely a last-ditch invite as part of Sonar’s black music theme this year because their sound had nothing to do with electronics: retrofitting hip-hop vocals to live drums and electric guitars is good old electro-acoustic music and tonight it seemed hopelessly out of place.

Watching The MFA play to thousands of people was a bit of a shock to the system – I’d caught them the week before in London playing to precisely ten. But their live set sounded exactly the same: cascading progressive house refitted for a new decade. Someone whispered in my ear that the set was sequenced all wrong but I think their problem is more fundamental: the MFA simply don’t have any interesting tunes, and when you’re playing prog, which de-emphasizes drums and rhythm anyhow, that’s a serious handicap.

So we cut out to catch Diplo, who was surprisingly great. I’d never heard a bar of his before and know very little about scratch DJs but even I could see that he had mad skills. Doubling up with partner A-trak, the pair rubbed their four turntables for all they were worth, conjuring up a genie of ragga, hip-hop and eighties pop (The Cure, The Bangles) that got the crowd jumping. They say you should never buy secondhand decks from a scratch DJ and I can see their point. Amazing.

Onto the DJs. Is just playing records entertainment enough? Obviously Miss Kittin doesn’t think so: she gussies up her perfectly serviceable electro sets with improvised wailing and aerobics-Goth-style dancing stage front and center. I can see why she’s popular: her starpower could be an entry point into techno for casual punters, but dark electro has never been my cup of tea and frankly, I was finding her performance faintly excruciating. We exited to the sounds of her warbling over Depeche Mode’s ‘Photografic’ which seemed very right: despite the techno trimmings, eighties pop is at the heart of her art.

In contrast, Ryan Elliott stood back and played a traditional DJ set and it was enough. Part of the Ghostly/Spectral showcase at Sonar, Elliot humbly let the records speak for themselves and the dancers found their feet. Being a nerd, I tend to judge DJs on how many “I have to know what this record is” moments they create, and with Elliott I lost count – he was spinning a kind of techno I now want to know all about: crystallized synths, a touch of darkness, intelligent yet danceable, graceful yet dirty. An hour of happiness, and Elliott wrapped up with the riff from Villalobos’ ‘808 the Bassqueen’, a gracious tip of the hat to the main draw waiting in the wings, the double act of Richie Hawtin and Ricardo Villalobos, who arrived stage right to a huge cheer.

Hawtin makes music with an overtly conceptual agenda, a minimalist manifesto that if you minus parts from techno, the result will be greater. In practice, what gets minused are the melodies, the bass and the treble lines. Hawtin is so mathematical about his subtractions that it’s easy for me to calculate the result: the music was only interesting when it left in a) percussion or b) one or two note treble lines. Alas, eighty percent of their set was simply washed out effects over a house beat and a sub-bass rumble. Somewhere along the line Hawtin and Villalobos minused my music and I’m left just not getting it.

But it was certainly hard and slamming. Looking around the amphitheater I wondered if perhaps that was enough: thousands seemed into it, never stopping dancing, never pausing for breath. Still, faces weren’t showing huge rushes of pleasure either. This question raced around my head: why is this austere strain of techno that has excised a lot of the pleasures of music, so incredibly popular? The stronger the ecstasy, the less need for exterior pleasure signifiers? Or were Hawtin and Villalobos just playing a bad set?

At the end, Ame’s club hit ‘Rej’ kicked in and the audience breathed out, smiled at each other and settled into dance. But two minutes in, strict schoolmaster Hawtin cut the track into another flatlining sub-bass rumble and the room deflated. Rigorous principles don’t necessarily make for a fun party. But like I said, I just don’t get it. It's like my uncle’s house, which he's decorated according to strict minimalist principles. There’s nowhere comfortable to sit.

As for the video screens, they dutifully showed Villalobos and Hawtin playing their records, but as the sun rose, flamenco dancers arrived on stage to cheers. I don’t know when people stopped dancing with each other and started dancing facing the DJ, when parties morphed into shows, but even today, when you’re dancing, the best thing to look is other people dancing. And at the best parties, people still lose themselves and dance with each other. And that’s spectacle enough.

MORE SONAR 2006 COVERAGE

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